In the days after the presidential election, news outlets and thousands of educators reported increases in harassment, bullying, and intimidation of students based on race, ethnicity, religion, and gender identity. While schools and colleges are on the frontline in confronting these incidents, one mechanism that for more than 35 years has served to curtail such actions is the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the U.S. Department of Education.

The federal agency’s mission is “to ensure equal access to education,” and it’s charged with enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination against marginalized populations—including students of color, religious and gender minorities, and students with disabilities. In recent years OCR has issued guidance to states and local school districts on their legal obligation to meet the educational needs of transgender students, students with ADHD, and youth in juvenile justice facilities; the civil-rights unit also tracks how well public schools and districts nationwide measure up on equity in learning opportunities.

Understanding the opportunity and achievement gaps in U.S. universitiesRead more

As one president wraps up his term and another takes the reigns, some have speculated on what a Donald Trump administration and Education Secretary-nominee Betsy DeVos foretell for the civil-rights branch given indications that they plan to downsize the department. With many unknowns still in play, The Atlantic invited voices in education representing divergent viewpoints to offer their outlook and prognosis on the Education Department’s civil-rights arm. The responses, via email, have been edited for clarity and length.

Melinda D. Anderson: It would seem that the fundamental work of the current OCR—whether focused on sexual harassment and violence, racial bullying, transgender discrimination, or other efforts—is providing equitable learning environments. Could this work look different in the new administration and a DeVos-led Department of Education? If so, how?

Thomas J. Gentzel, the executive director of the National School Boards Association

[Though] the fundamental work of OCR is enforcing civil-rights laws in education, it is the job of school districts to provide equitable learning environments and, ultimately, to balance all of the competing interests so that all students have safe environments in which to learn. NSBA has been concerned about executive overreach through the issuance of guidance [and] will continue to urge the incoming administration to exercise restraint in such an approach to achieving its educational objectives.

Dan Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project

A major question is to what extent a Trump [administration] will seek to unleash the forces of the far right and yield OCR [and the Department of Justice] as hammers for its agenda, versus dramatically diminishing the federal role in education by substantially cutting OCR's budget and reducing OCR's footprint. The latter entails allowing those [far right] forces to go unchecked at the state and local levels [where] they clearly have power and influence … [it’s] like the difference between aggressive and passive aggressive, but [both] mean a big difference in the lives of children. I predict a lot more bullying, much less sensitivity, and blatant bigotry being tolerated [at schools and campuses.]

Robert Shibley, the executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group focused on free speech in academia, and the author of Twisting Title IX

The fundamental work of OCR is to enforce the anti-discrimination laws over which it has been given jurisdiction by Congress, as well as duly enacted regulations based on those laws. I suspect that most of OCR’s work will remain largely unchanged, but an agency’s interpretation of laws and regulations is bound to change somewhat with a change of political control. Consensus won’t be possible on every controversial issue, but OCR’s efforts to fight discrimination are severely hobbled from the start if stakeholders don’t even have the sense that they have been given a fair hearing, as they weren’t with the April 4, 2011 [letter to colleges, universities, and schools] mandating that institutions use the preponderance of the evidence standard in sexual-misconduct hearings.

Harper Jean Tobin,the director of policy for the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Transgender Equality

OCR's mission will not change. How effective it is in carrying out that mission will depend in large part on the resources provided by Congress and the leadership provided by the president and his appointees. Unfortunately, the president-elect's nominee for secretary of education and other members of his leadership team have shown an indifference or hostility to civil-rights enforcement in general, and hostility to certain communities in particular, including LGBT communities.

Anderson: What do you predict as the biggest change—either in approach or execution—as the Department of Education’s civil-rights arm transitions from the Obama era?

Gentzel: Not much is known about the incoming administration’s agenda for education … [however,] the nation’s school boards will advocate for equity and excellence in public education, as well as oppose privatization schemes that drain public dollars from our public schools.

Losen: Assuming DeVos and Senator Jeff Sessions [for attorney general] are confirmed, the biggest change will be that a Trump administration will ignore blatant civil-rights violations … seek changes that will add to segregated schools, and allow bullying of discrete and insular minority groups of children. From a civil-rights perspective, we can hope that what looks like a tidal wave peters out before it hits land, but we must prepare for the [impact] … This will be much, much worse than the prior Republican administrations who at least gave lip service to basic civil-rights issues. We will see a true crisis in U.S. civil rights and not just in education.

“Enforcing civil rights is not a zero-sum game.”

Shibley: I don’t have any special knowledge of how OCR’s policies might change [but] I hope and recommend that the new OCR leadership withdraw the preponderance mandate, replace its unconstitutionally broad definition of sexual harassment with one that is in accord with Supreme Court case law, and recommit itself to going through proper notice and comment rulemaking procedures so that the interests of all concerned parties are actually taken into account.

Tobin: That depends greatly on the direction taken by the Secretary of Education and other appointees, funding from Congress, and rulings from the courts. There could be both a tremendous slow-down in civil-rights work in general and an abandonment of students' civil rights in certain areas, or even reversing course and advocating against students' civil rights in certain areas.

Anderson: What is the overriding message the federal government should be sending to states, school districts, and schools regarding civil rights in educational programs and activities?

Gentzel: The federal government should carry out its obligations to enforce federal civil rights in schools, and look to states and local school boards as partners in determining local solutions to address the [ultimate] needs of students.

Losen: That enforcing civil rights is not a zero-sum game, but that we are all better off when our system of public education promotes equity in opportunity and justice for all. If the president-elect applied to be a school superintendent, based on his words and his history of actions—including refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, making racist statements about a sitting judge, operating a fraudulent school, and boasting of sexual assault—no school board in America would hire him.

Shibley: OCR’s overriding message should be that unlawful discrimination will not be permitted in programs over which it has jurisdiction; that OCR will continually work to ensure that it provides clear, legally sound guidance on how to obey those laws without unduly violating institutional freedoms; and that institutions reasonably suspected of violating federal law should expect an uncompromisingly thorough, fair, and impartial investigation.

Tobin: The federal government should provide educators with meaningful guidance on how to comply with the law in areas where educators have a lot of questions. It should reflect the best practices in education so that educators around the country can learn from them. It should be urging schools to do right by their students—to protect their safety, their dignity, and their ability to fully participate in school—and showing them how. It should stand consistently for the principle that every student matters and is equal in dignity, [with an equal] chance to learn. OCR has a very strong record in recent years of doing just that.

This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.